Bible Gateway Blog

In the communities of the faithful, men had to impress upon themselves and upon others what Jesus said and did, for the more convinced they were that he was neither a Jewish pretender nor an unsubstantial deity like one of the deities of the cults, the more urgent it was for them to recall that his words were the rule of their life, and that his actions in history had created their position in the world; they had to think out their faith, to state it against outside criticism, and to teach it within their own circle, instead of being content with it as a mere emotion; they had also to refresh their courage by anticipating the future, which they believed was in the hands of their Lord….

The common basis of their life was the conviction that they enjoyed a new relationship with God, for which they were indebted to Jesus. The technical term for this relationship was “covenant,” and “covenant” became eventually in their vocabulary “testament.” Hence the later name for these writings of the church, when gathered into a sacred collection, was “The New Testament”—New because the older relationship of God to his people, which had obtained under Judaism with its Old Testament, was superseded by the faith and fellowship which Jesus Christ his Son had inaugurated. It was the consciousness of this that inspired the early Christians to live, and to write about the origin and applications of this new life. They wrote for their own age, without a thought of posterity, and they did not write in unison but in harmony.

Excerpted from A New Translation of the Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments by James Moffatt (1870-1944), London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1935, New York: Harper, 1935, Introduction, p. xxii